Paperback Pipe Dreams
by Hecate's Rath
Summary: It's not perfect; it never was. The greatest beauty is that it never needed to be. Haymitch and Effie do life.


AN: Well. So, I've been trying to write Hunger Games fic for about six months now, but _nothing would come_, until I watched _Out of Africa_ in my Post-Colonialism Literature class (which sounds a lot more pretentious than it actually is). So instead of watching Robert Redford (who looks like Brad Pitt, or maybe it's the other way around?) and Meryl Streep get it on, I wrote… this. Please enjoy!

Warning: Strong language

Disclaimer: I'm just playing in Suzanne Collins' sandbox.

* * *

Effie's not quite sure what to do with herself, after Katniss burns out bright.

She cannot bear to escort anymore—there is no sense, no pleasure left in playacting at the Capitol. Effie simply cannot bear to be a part of that charade any more. It doesn't make sense, because Katniss and Peeta are the only two she saw survive (twice!) but they're the ones who haunt her nightmares.

She washes her skin, puts the makeup and wigs and fancy clothes away, and lets her hair grow long. And she learns to _read_.

She knew how to read (of course she did, she's not a heathen!), but she read only as a means to an end. After she gives up escorting, she learns to read for the sake of a good book. She learns to read because she _can_.

She really likes the romances. Effie's always been _romantic_. Romance comes easy as breathing, to her. She is a hopeless romantic to her very core, and she loves the paperback romances.

They are her favorites, and Effie spends far too much time flipping through the creased books. She presses herself between the pages, gives herself over to those heroes of ages past. Effie longs to play the helpless heroine, wants only for a knight in shining armor. She would be content with living the stories she loses herself in, but reality knocks her flat, most of the time.

Haymitch runs into her (literally) one day, purely by accident. He almost doesn't recognize her, in a soft skirt and blouse, her hair long and spun silk around her shoulders.

He didn't realize how _young_ she was. She is only just 23, only barely old enough to do anything at all, and with her baby blues and soft angles, she could pass for eighteen.

(He'd never tell her that. She would screech something awful, and Haymitch has never liked Effie's screeching.)

But Haymitch nearly bowls her over in his haste to get to Katniss and Peeta, who've just appeared, and he almost doesn't stop, but something in her blue blue eyes gives him pause and he looks up and "wait—_Effie_?"

And, in typical Effie fashion, she huffs and tugs her clothes straight, sweeping her blonde curls behind her ears. She pins him down with her haughty gaze for all that she's a good half a foot shorter than she is. "I would hope that you would watch where you're going a bit better, Haymitch," she sniffs. "Although I guess that's a bit much to ask of you. Drinking already, are you?" she asks archly and eyes the bottle in his fist.

(It's something clear, she notices, and it's always something clear. Effie's not naïve enough to convince herself it's only water. It's only water the way Katniss' tears are only saline to Peeta.)

Haymitch replies gruffly and brushes past her. He almost knocks her over, but Effie teeters on her heels and steadies herself. The man whose shoulders she grabbed gives her a look like she's the one drinking the clear poison in the bottle, but she brushes him off and marches up to Katniss and Peeta herself.

(Katniss scares her. There's a haunted, hunted look in her eyes that, Effie knows in the very pit of her stomach will never go away, not completely.)

* * *

The second time she sees Haymitch after she's shed her caterpillar shell, it's in District 12. Rather, it's on the train on the way to District 12. Effie is sitting quietly, reading her paperback, and Haymitch stumbles into her, dumping his liquor down her shirt when the train lurches.

Effie _screeches_ and Haymitch winces.

"I know I didn't miss _something_ about you," he grumbles as Effie hops around like a demented squirrel, holding her shirt out and chittering about stains.

(Damn it, it's cold, the liquor, and it burns all the way down her blouse, down her brassiere, all the way to her bellybutton before she manages to stop it. It's _cold_, and Effie's never liked the cold.)

She finally composes herself and fixes Haymitch with a glare to rival Katniss'. "Would you _watch where you're going_?" she hisses, sounding more vicious than she ever has.

Haymitch almost apologizes, but something about Effie flushed and angry _does_ something to him, and he decides to stoke the flame a little more. He grins and it does the trick—Effie lets out a sound of frustration somewhere between a screech and a gasp, and slaps him clear across the mouth.

(That little red handprint lasts longer than he does around Effie—she orders him _out of her sight_ like the spoiled little princess she is—but it makes him smile even wider. Effie's anger makes him feel _alive_.)

She flips her hair over her shoulder and fixes him with a death glare, storming off to the bathroom with a threat that if he was still standing there when she returned, she would break his nose.

(Haymitch doubts Effie has enough strength in her little fists to even _bruise_ his nose, and he tempts fate for a moment, considering that fire in her eyes, but then he decides Effie has had enough excitement for one day and he retreats.)

* * *

The third time Haymitch and Effie run into each other, it is entirely Effie's fault. She will never admit it, because Effie _does not_ run into people like some undignified, uneducated, bumbling village idiot, but the fact remains that she is absorbed in her paperback and she simply doesn't see Haymitch (who, for once, is stone cold sober) moseying along the street.

He is turned, saying something to Peeta over his shoulder and Effie just smacks into him.

She bounces off of him and falls into a puddle on the sidewalk. Her book lands next to her with a wet splat and she screeches again and _that_ is how Haymitch knows who has just run into him.

"Haymitch Abernathy, you _insufferable, unobservant oath_!" Effie howls, struggling up. It's hard to be dignified when she's dripping muddy water, clutching her ruined paperback, her blonde curls limp and stringy around her face, but Effie manages it.

Effie always manages dignity, at least as far as she is concerned. Haymitch rather thinks she looks like drowned cat, and he tells her. She makes a sound _much like_ a drowned cat and goes to smack him again.

This time, he catches her wrist in his hand and smirks down at her. "My nose is my best feature, doll," he drawls. "Let's not break it, and the ladies' hearts, eh?"

Effie narrows her eyes and struggles against him. "You—you—" She cannot come up with a suitable insult and settles with fixing Haymitch with the frostiest gaze she can manage under the circumstances.

Haymitch finally sighs. "Truce? How about I take you back to my place and give you something dry to wear?"

Effie wrinkles her nose. "I'm not that naïve, Haymitch."

He laughs. "You're a little too frosty for my taste, cupcake," he replies. "Come on. You're going to get sick and I'll not take the blame for that. Come on."

Effie finally relents (her blouse is quickly turning see-through, and her hair is going to start _frizzing_) and, two cups of hot tea and a much-too-large tunic later, Effie is picking through Haymitch's house like something might jump out and bite her. Something might. Effie (and Haymitch, for that matter) wouldn't put that possibility out of the realm of imagination.

"This is _disgusting_," she says, pulling her hair up in a ponytail. "Really, Haymitch, this is _gross_."

He shrugs. (He's never had a reason to care, before now. He's still not sure he's got one.)

* * *

Effie kind of moves in.

Turns out, she's a little OCD, and three hours after she'd left Haymitch's house, she'd returned in a pair of soft pink pants and a fitted tunic, and she'd started cleaning the house from top to bottom in little under four hours.

Haymitch informs her that she's set a new record and she wrinkles her little nose up in disgust. "Haymitch, that's _gross_," she says. "You can't live like this."

"So don't allow it," he says, and it's almost a challenge, and all of a sudden, Haymitch is serious.

"I don't intend to," she replies after a good pause, and suddenly, Haymitch has more to lose than he's prepared to.

* * *

Effie whips the house into shape.

She scrubs the windows biweekly, washes the floors daily, and tries to learn to cook. She fails at the cooking. Miserably. Haymitch won't even pretend to like eating the charred hunk of charcoal she tried to tell him was squirrel. He told her that if that was squirrel, he was a mockingjay and went in search of two bowls from Greasy Sae.

The cooking doesn't get better. She keeps trying until she _almost burns the damn house down_, and Haymitch puts an end to that. He doesn't mind to buy their food already prepared, he swears.

Effie cries miserable tears over her disaster as a housewife, and Haymitch teases her until she's forgotten to be sad, and is just pissed off at him.

* * *

Sleeping with Effie is like sleeping with an overzealous (and exceptionally hairy) octopus. In the daylight, Effie only has two arms and two legs, but Haymitch _swears_ she grows an extra four limbs at dark every night.

And she clings to him. Attaches herself to him like some barnacle suffering from severe separation anxiety, and Haymitch tries his damndest to peel her off.

It doesn't work.

Okay, well, it does for about three minutes, and then she's _right back_, clinging to him like he's going somewhere. It's his house, dammit. If anyone's leaving, it's her.

(He doesn't want her to. And when she peers over her shoulder at him with those pretty blues, he _really really_ doesn't want her to.)

* * *

If he's being blunt (and he's Haymitch, blunt is his trademark), he really likes Effie. He likes her hair and her girly smell and her scowl and her nose and her tears and her kisses and all the things she can do with her body. He really likes those things.

And Effie smacks him for saying so, accusing him of objectifying her. He doesn't deny it. He's a man. He likes having sex with Effie.

(She's pleased, of course she is. Because Haymitch may be crude and crass and blunt, but he's _hers_, and Effie very nearly loves him. Her paperbacks paint romance with watercolors, but Haymitch teaches her that love is more bright splashes of paint on canvas than it is dull watercolor. It's not perfect, not even close. And that's what Effie learns.)

* * *

If he thought Effie scorned was bad, that bitch has nothing on Effie knocked up.

He never meant for it to happen. Really, Haymitch as never seen himself as the fatherly type. (Of course, he never saw himself as _Effie's_ type, either, and look how that turned out.)

He doesn't respond the way Effie wants him to. He's not happy about it. He's really, really not. And Haymitch won't lie. He won't mask his pure terror about being responsible for a human life (_weren't the hunger games enough, Effie, weren't they enough_?! he'll ask) and he won't tell her it's okay.

It's not okay. It's not even close.

Effie slaps him and kicks him out.

It's the last time he's drunk—the night he finds out he's going to be a father. And for all that he's being _totally hammered_ before, he gets the drunkest he's ever been. He passes out before he gets home to Effie and spends three weeks on Katniss' couch.

(Three weeks later he will move back into the house. There will be no apologies, but there will also be no more drinking. It's a compromise, in their way, and that's all either of them will ever get.)

* * *

The first time Haymitch holds his son, he can honestly swear that he's never been _so fucking terrified _in all his life. Not when his name got called at the Reaping, not when he won the games, not when he watched innocent kids die, not when Katniss and Peeta survived twice—_never_. This is the single most terrifying moment of his life.

Effie looks at them carefully, almost like she expects Haymitch to drop their son and not be sorry, like she expects him to drop him and run.

He doesn't. He thinks about it for a minute, but then the minute passes and he can breathe again.

* * *

Motherhood suits Effie about as well as cooking did.

Really, they're shitty parents.

Haymitch isn't patient _at all_ and Effie isn't the most maternal person in Panem. They don't have an ounce of parental instinct between them, and it will be a damn miracle if the kid survives to adulthood.

(He does.)

* * *

Effie still reads. Haymitch still complains about having to share a bed with what he calls the "Octo-Effie." Effie tries cooking again; Haymitch tells her that the next time she tries, he will have her committed. Haymitch takes another drink, once, and Effie kicks him out for three months and that's it, that's the last, last time. She bitches about him taking his boots off before he comes in the house and he tells her it's his house and he'll do as he pleases. There are two more kids, and they try just as hard to screw them up, but the three turn out decent anyway. The nasty little brats give Effie gray hair that she shrieks over and Haymitch tells her to shut the hell up; she finally looks less he's robbed the cradle. He gets a black eye for that one.

And it's not perfect. Those paperbacks were only ever pipe dreams; Effie grows to be more than that. She sheds her paperback dreams and loves deeper than Prince Charming ever could.

So it's not perfect; it never was. The greatest beauty was that it never needed to be.

* * *

AN: Thank you for reading! If you've got any words to spare, I'd love to hear them!


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